Debunked: Growth Hacking

Ever heard of growth hacking? Most people have, it’s has become a particularly popular term in recent times in the marketing industry. Some even describe growth hacking as a clear strategy for success among small businesses and startups. If it’s so good, we should probably explain exactly what it is.

Growth Hacking

It’s really quite simple, growth hacking aims to grow your business rapidly over a short period of time. Typically done through extreme experimentation across all marketing channels to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow in the future.

When we say extreme experiments, it’s comprised of both conventional and unconventional work that is carried out by marketers, engineers and product managers that test and change both the marketing and the product development to focus on the user.

The most important thing to note about growth hacking is that it is low cost and efficient. It uses marketing such as social media, viral marketing or targeted advertising instead of buying advertising through more traditional media such as radio, newspaper, and television.

The Process of Growth Hacking

1. Know Your Goals

First, you need to know what your actionable goals are, what the aim of the campaign is, a 50% increase in conversions? More calls? More visits to the website? Growth hacking works by narrowing down the concept and building around it.

2. Track Goals

If you’ve set a milestone and an end goal, you need to be able to monitor whether it actually happens. This is where Google Analytics is extremely valuable for a successful growth hack.

3. Understand Your Strengths

If something is currently working for you, and working well, it’s worth leaving it to the bottom of the pile and learn why they work so well. Understanding how a particular page on your website is creating a 50% conversion rate, for example, is extremely important because if you apply the strengths to your other pages, you will see a burst in conversions across all pages, thus, hacking your website growth.

4. Let’s Experiment!

You know all of the information you learned from your strongest pages, let’s now apply that across the site, test the different call to actions, the size of fonts or the layout.

5. Optimise, Optimise and Optimise Further

Every experiment will give you data that can be used to optimise these experiments. An example of this would be using A/B and multi-variant testing on buttons, link colours, image placement and how the content reads.

6. Repeat all of that

Just because you’ve gone through the process once, doesn’t mean that it stops, it should be a continual process that keeps boosting your conversion goals. Sounds easy right?

Is Growth Hacking here to stay?

It’s important to note that growth hacking isn’t a replacement for digital marketing, it is instead a form of marketing that works for some businesses. Others find that traditional creative marketing works better for them.

Some marketing agencies are classing it as a fad, with a very clear timestamp, however, with it being adapted by many including Airbnb, it could be that the name may change, but not the substance.

Here at Rooster Marketing, we believe that growth hacking is simply a new way of thinking and adapting to the environment. We have an approach of using only reliable, informative and accurate data to make decisions.

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